Mulayam, his sons likely to get clean chit in DA case

The CBI is set to give a clean chit to Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav and his sons — Prateek and Akhilesh — in the disproportionate assets case that it has been probing for six years. Rajesh Ahuja reports.

The CBI is set to give a clean chit to Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav and his sons — Prateek and UP chief minister Akhilesh — in the disproportionate assets case that it has been probing for six years.

The CBI officially maintained on Saturday that no final decision had been taken yet. But a CBI source said that the team investigating the charges had put its clean chit on record. “The file will now go to the CBI director and the director of prosecution for a decision,” a source familiar with the probe told HT.

Vishwanath Chaturvedi, the Rae Bareli lawyer who had moved the Supreme Court to seek the probe, told HT: “A central minister threatened me on Thursday, asking me not to object to the CBI’s move in the SC.” He said he would name the minister in the SC when the matter comes up before it.

BJP spokesperson Nirmala Sitharaman was quick to link the CBI’s move to a probable change of heart in the Yadav camp about the food security bill.

Yadav, though, claiming ignorance of the CBI move, said in Lucknow he would keep opposing the bill in “in its present form”.

Congress’ Sandeep Dikshit said: “Mulayam and his politics are above these things… I don’t think we should demean him by assuming a simple report would dictate his political decisions.”

The CBI had registered a preliminary inquiry in March 2007, two years after Chaturvedi moved the SC seeking its directions for a probe. Now, the agency’s move comes almost four months after Mulayam publicly acknowledged that it was difficult to fight the Centre that could “use the CBI and put one in jail”.

Chaturvedi is also ready with a curative petition to be filed before the SC to seek the recall of its order dropping proceedings against Akhilesh Yadav’s wife Dimple.

The SC in December last year had dropped an assets inquiry against Dimple, as she was not a public servant between April 1, 1993 and March 31, 2005 — the period that the agency had taken into account for its probe. The court had also held that Dimple’s income from her agriculture business had been wrongly clubbed with Akhilesh’s.

After Dimple’s exclusion from the probe, the CBI investigators were of the view that it would be difficult for them to make a case against Mulayam, Akhilesh and Prateek if the assets attributed to Akhikesh’s wife were out of the equation.